Washington – U.S. President Barack Obama made good Tuesday on a threat to veto a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, bringing the two sides in the long-running controversy to a rare point of agreement: their battle is far from over.

”The president’s veto of the Keystone jobs bill is a national embarrassment,” said the top Republican in the House of Representatives, John Boehner.

”We are not going to give up in our efforts to get this pipeline built — not even close.”

[…]

Even the White House concurred that the issue is far from settled. It pointed out that Tuesday’s announcement was a step in a long, winding process — not a final destination.

The president cast the veto as a matter of procedural principle. In his letter to Congress, Obama said the bill he was scrapping had improperly tried to usurp presidential authority.Read More

The scientists were categorical that geoengineering should not be deployed now, and was too risky to ever be considered an alternative to cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.Read More

Officials outlined draconian plans for alternating cuts that would leave areas without water for five days at a time.

“If the rain persists in not falling into the Cantareira reservoir system, the solution would be for very heavy rationing,” said Paulo Massato, director of the state water company Sabesp.

Sabesp runs the Cantareira system, which supplies nearly half of the Sao Paulo metropolitan area, South America’s largest city with some 20 million people.

“The rationing would see two days with water and then five without,” he said late Tuesday.

[…]

Unless it rains soon, supplies could run out altogether by March.

Brazil Drought: Worst Water Crisis In 80 Years Affecting Four Million People In Country’s South East

IBT Times, January 25

Water cuts and blackouts have spread across large areas of south-east Brazil as a result of the worst drought in the country since 1930. The drought has hit Brazil’s three most populous states: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais.

More than four million people have been affected by water rationing and power cuts. In the Madureira district of Rio residents have mounted demonstrations, beating empty buckets and cans to express their frustration. The district has been without tap water since before Christmas. Other cities have seen similar demonstrations.

The drought first hit in São Paulo, where hundreds of thousands of residents have had water supplies cut. The region should normally be experiencing its rainy season.

São Paulo state suffered similar serious drought problems last year. At an emergency meeting of five government ministers in the country’s capital, Brasilia, Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira says that the three states must save water.

“Since records for Brazil’s south-eastern region began 84 years ago we have never seen such a delicate and worrying situation,” said Teixeira.

NASA and NOAA scientists report 2014 was 0.07F (0.04C) higher than previous records and the 38th consecutive year of above-average temperatures

The numbers are in. The year 2014 – after shattering temperature records that had stood for hundreds of years across virtually all of Europe, and roasting parts of South America, China and Russia – was the hottest on record, with global temperatures 1.24F (0.69C) higher than the 20th-century average, US government scientists said on Friday.

A day after international researchers warned that human activities had pushed the planet to the brink, new evidence of climate change arrived. The world was the hottest it has been since systematic records began in 1880, especially on the oceans, which the agency confirmed were the driver of 2014’s temperature rise.

The global average temperatures over land and sea surface for the year were 1.24F (0.69C) above the 20th-century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) reported. Nasa, which calculates temperatures slightly differently, put 2014’s average temperature at 14.67C – 0.68C above the average – for the period 1951-80.

The scientists said 2014 was 0.07F (0.04C) higher than the previous records set in 2005 and 2010, and the 38th consecutive year of above-average temperatures.

That means nobody born since 1976 has experienced a colder-than-average year.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

“We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

During a recent hike in Washington State’s Olympic National Park, I marveled at the delicate geometry of frost-covered ferns. White crystalline structures seemed to grow from the green leaves, encasing them in a frozen frame of temporary beauty.

Progressing further up into the mountains, I stopped to lunch and sip hot coffee from a thermos while gazing across a river valley at a snow-covered mountainside, sizing up a frozen waterfall for a possible ice climb in the future. Yet I found myself beginning to wonder how many more winters ice would continue to form there.

The disparity of the beauty before me with my troubled thoughts about the planet has found no reconciliation. I had been collecting data and conducting interviews for articles about methane releases in the Arctic for weeks, and pondering the information through the holidays only led me into depression. Going out into the mountains helped, but also provoked grave concerns for our collective future.

[…]

According to a study published in Nature Geoscience, twice as much methane as previously thought is being released from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a 2 million square kilometer area off the coast of northern Siberia. The recent study’s researchers found that at least 17 teragrams (17 million tons) of methane are being released into the atmosphere each year, whereas a 2010 study had found only seven teragrams heading into the atmosphere.

In what is being described as a fundamental shift in how the coal industry does business, over 40 percent of all coal produced in Wyoming is now being first sold not to a power plant or a utility, but to a subsidiary of the same company that mined the coal — a 17-fold increase since 2004 for the U.S.’s largest coal-producing state.

According to a new report by the Center for American Progress, these inside deals between coal companies and their own subsidiaries (known as “captive transactions”) are aimed, in part, at intentionally dodging federal and state royalty payments and maximizing taxpayer-funded subsidies from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The CAP review, released on Tuesday, found that five of the largest coal companies operating in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana have collectively created a network of 566 subsidiary companies through which they sell and market coal. Peabody Energy alone, which operates the country’s largest coal mine in Wyoming, boasts 242 domestic and foreign subsidiaries, with names like Coal Sales II, LLC.

Under current regulations, coal companies pay royalties on the first sale to another company after mining coal on federal land. The coal then can be bought and sold multiple times until it reaches a final destination and is sold to an end user, such as a power plant where it is burned for electricity. By building up hundreds of subsidiaries, coal companies have been able to sell to their own companies and partners, allegedly paying royalties based on an artificially low sale price. The CAP analysis presents evidence that captive transactions are common practice in the coal industry and regularly exploited to evade royalty payments and maximize subsidies.

“Increasingly, the major coal companies are selling Powder River Basin coal not on an open market, but to an elaborate network of shell companies that they own and control,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, a Senior Fellow and Director of the Public Lands Project at CAP in a press release. “This gaming of the system is costing federal and state governments millions of dollars in lost royalty payments and giving the Powder River Basin an unfair advantage over other U.S. coal producing regions.”

Its first attempt to develop genetically engineered grass ended disastrously for the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. The grass escaped into the wild from test plots in Oregon in 2003, dooming the chances that the government would approve the product for commercial use.

Yet Scotts is once again developing genetically modified grass that would need less mowing, be a deeper green and be resistant to damage from the popular weedkiller Roundup. But this time the grass will not need federal approval before it can be field-tested and marketed.

Scotts and several other companies are developing genetically modified crops using techniques that either are outside the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Department or use new methods — like “genome editing” — that were not envisioned when the regulations were created.

The department has said, for example, that it has no authority over a new herbicide-resistant canola, a corn that would create less pollution from livestock waste, switch grass tailored for biofuel production, and even an ornamental plant that glows in the dark.

The EPA issued a final rule on the disposal of coal ash, a byproduct of coal burning that contains toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, and selenium. Up until now, disposal of coal ash hasn’t been regulated by the federal government at all. Now it will be regulated, but not very strongly.

“Your banana peel that you throw away has stronger protections when it winds up in a dump than coal ash does,” says Mary Anne Hitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, who is highly critical of the new rule.

More than 100 million tons of coal ash are produced annually in the US, and much of it is simply dumped into open pits. In recent years, there have been large coal-ash spills into rivers in Tennessee and North Carolina.

[…]

Coal ash will instead be categorized as “solid waste,” also known as garbage, and its disposal will be held to a lower standard. The rule does include requirements about where and how coal ash is stored that are intended to prevent leaching into groundwater. It has to be placed “above the uppermost aquifer,” and protected with a geomembrane and a two-foot layer of compacted soil. But environmentalists say that’s not strong enough. Also, old coal-ash dumps won’t have to be cleaned up or improved unless problems are discovered. And the EPA’s new rules won’t even be enforced by the federal government; enforcement will be left to the states.

With the recent release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s newest climate report, the pressure is on localities more than ever to understand, expect, and curb emissions ahead of our planet’s future warming.

While the United States has pledged to cut down on its carbon output, the states are slower in picking up the tab — and some seem to be unable to understand the severity of the situation. Others are even allegedly willing to hide the truth.

Several states have been exposed for their past questionable climate practices, and South Carolina is one of those that has fallen under public scrutiny over a state-sponsored climate report that has stayed on the shelf for more than a year after it was declared ready for public release.

Back in November 2011 South Carolina’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) completed a report on local effects of climate change. At the time, then-DNR director John Frampton pronounced the document ready for public review.

Properties worth over £1bn will be lost to coastal erosion in England and Wales over the next century, with no compensation for homeowners, as it becomes too costly to protect them.

The Guardian, By Damian Carrington, December 28

Almost 7,000 homes and buildings will be sacrificed to the rising seas around England and Wales over the next century, according to an unpublished Environment Agency (EA) analysis seen by the Guardian. Over 800 of the properties will be lost to coastal erosion within the next 20 years.

The properties, worth well over £1bn, will be allowed to fall into the sea because the cost of protecting them would be far greater. But there is no compensation scheme for homeowners to enable them to move to a safer location.

In December 2013, a huge tidal surge flooded 1,400 homes along the east coast and saw numerous homes tumble into the ocean. Earlier this month, the environment secretary, Liz Truss, visited Lowestoft on the anniversary of the surge, which flooded the town.

San Antonio — Gas flaring in the most profitable shale field in the U.S. is on pace to surpass to 2013 levels of waste and pollution in South Texas, according to a newspaper analysis of state records published Sunday.

The Eagle Ford Shale burned off more than 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas in the first seven months of this year, according to the Railroad Commission of Texas, which oversees the oil and gas industry. The tons of pollutants released into the air already exceed levels for 2012.

The San Antonio Express-News (http://bit.ly/1ATJFNW ) also found some of the top sources of flaring in 2014 lacked state-mandated permits to flare natural gas. The goal of flaring is to incinerate impurities, but it generates air pollution and carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that scientists say contributes to climate change.

Railroad Commission spokeswoman Ramona Nye said Friday that the agency sent violation notices to three energy companies after the newspaper asked about their permitting status.

Just two weeks ago, we learned from twin scientific publications that the massive ice sheet of West Antarctica, which could cause over 10 feet of sea level rise, may be less stable than previously thought.

And now, this week, two studies suggest virtually the same thing about the still more massive ice sheet of Greenland, which, if it were to melt entirely, could raise global sea levels by as much as 23 feet — an outcome that, while it surely would not happen in our lifetimes, would dramatically reshape the world’s coastlines.

The reason for the increased worry is similar in both cases.

The researchers suggest that prior computer modeling efforts – including estimates from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – may be just too conservative. They may not capture the full dynamics of what is happening with these ice sheets in a warming world.

Lima, Peru – After late-night wrangling at U.N. talks in Peru, negotiators early Sunday reached a compromise deal that sets the stage for a global climate pact in Paris next year.

The main goal for the two-week session in Lima was relatively modest: Reach agreement on what information should go into the pledges that countries submit for a global climate pact expected to be adopted in Paris. But even that became complicated as several developing nations rebelled against a draft decision they said blurred the distinction between what rich and poor countries can be expected to do.

The Lima agreement was adopted hours after a previous draft was rejected by developing countries who accused rich nations of shirking their responsibilities to fight global warming and pay for its impacts.

Peru’s environment minister presented a new, fourth draft just before midnight and said he hoped it would satisfy all parties, giving a sharply reduced body of remaining delegates an hour to review it.

“As a text it’s not perfect, but it includes the positions of the parties,” said the minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who was the conference chairman and had spent all afternoon and evening meeting separately with delegations.

[…]

However, it weakened language on the content of the pledges, saying they “may” instead of “shall” include quantifiable information showing how countries intend to meet their emissions targets. Also, top carbon polluter China and other major developing countries opposed plans for a review process that would allow the pledges to be compared against one another before Paris.

[…]

“I think it’s definitely watered down from what we expected,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Sam Smith, chief of climate policy for the environmental group WWF, said: “The text went from weak to weaker to weakest and it’s very weak indeed.”

Late-night wrangling between United Nations members in Lima secured agreement between developing and rich nations on a framework for making firm pledges to cut pollution at a summit in Paris next year.

But Friends of the Earth’s international climate campaigner Asad Rehman said:

The only thing these talks have achieved is to reduce the chances of a fair and effective agreement to tackle climate change in Paris next year.

Once again poorer nations have been bullied by the industrialised world into accepting an outcome which leaves many of their citizens facing the grim prospect of catastrophic climate change.

We have the ingenuity and resources to build the low carbon future we so urgently need – but we still lack the political will.

The biggest issue left unresolved for Paris is the burden for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The draft text retains language of “common but differentiated responsibilities” that has over the years given developing countries a pass on cutting emissions. That language remains in the text although with a rider “in light of different national circumstances”. Stern acknowledged to reporters the issue was likely to come up again at Paris.

And the text adopted on Sunday no longer makes it mandatory for countries to provide detailed information about their prospect reductions targets.

Campaigners said that would make it increasingly difficult to be sure the deal would manage to keep warming within the 2 degree threshold.